The Review of 2022

It's now very much 2023, but I've seen a number of "What did I get up to in 2022?" posts recently so thought I'd try and do the same before everyone has consigned 2022 to the dustbin of history.

So, in 2022 I manged to achieve the following:

Painting:

Most of the painting I've done has seemed to be bits and pieces to add into existing armies, with the most notable additions to the painted lead (and plastic) pile being:

• 10 1/700th ships for Black Sails
• A full 15mm Carolingian Frankish army for ADLG
• Some 15mm 3-D printed Etruscans, making up almost an armys worth 
• Quite a few 28mm Medieval Spanish, including some 3D printed infantry, Knights in both metal and plastic, and some Fireforge Almughavars too
• A 3D printed 28mm Macedonian elephant (so I do have to make and paint the rest of the army now!)
• A 3D printed 15mm fort 
• 3 Armoured Elephants in 15mm
• Some 15mm African Kingdoms cavalry, upcycling some Han chariot horses in the process
• Refurbishing, rebasing and adding to a large 15mm Hittite army    

Gaming

I also managed to fit in a few games - OK, more than "a few" perhaps! 

In fact, I played in..

• 14 L'Art de la Guerre competitions
• ..10 of which were in the UK, the others being in Spain, Germany, Portugal and Italy
• ..in total those events saw me playing 63 individual games
• ..using 13 different armies
• ..and playing against 51 different opponents throughout the year

The range of armies I used was eclectic to say the least - starting with the peasant rabble of the Peoples Crusade, contrasting with the small but tough mounted army of the Medieval Hungarians, the shooting power (and heavy metal armour) of the French Ordonnance, the inestimable Swiss doing what Swiss do best, a pseudo-Roman Palmyran army with bolt shooters and cataphracts, the endless shieldwall of the Dark Age Rus, some well-padded elephants and dangerously explosive artillery in the Delhi Sultanate,  a double-helping of Khurasanians (playing singles and doubles), the mounted archery, Immortals and hapless wallpapered battle towers of Cyrus' Achaemenids, their predecessors the Assyrians in 28mm falling like wolves upon the flock, the Rolls Royce-like combined arms spectacle and colour of the (28mm) Ghaznavids, the Homeric Heroics of the Myceneans and finally (and probably least succesfully!) the high Steppe fully armoured horsemanship of the Tibetans to round out the year.  

Outside of ADLG events, I've also played club and friendly games using O Group (in 10mm), Chain of Command (20mm), ADLG Renaissance, Cold War Commander (6mm), FoGR (15mm) and Blitzkreig Commander (10mm). 

 

Other Stuff 

2022 also saw the Madaxeman media empire churn out;

• 32 blog posts on this blog (aka new items on the front page of Madaxeman.com) 
• Half a dozen episodes of the Madaxeman Podcast, 
• The Podcast also saw 4,500 episodes downloaded during the year
• The most popular Podcast episode was one entitled "Oh My Aachen Nuts!" where we talked about a road trip to a competition in Germany. This was downloaded 477 times in the last 12 months.
• The Madaxeman YouTube Channel had 12,150 views in the last year, adding up to 1,600 hours of watch time (!!) 
• The most watched video of the year was a report of games at the Beachhead competition, which totted up some 1,675 views and over 300 hours of view time.
• I somehow also managed to send 994 Tweets from the Madaxeman Twitter account (!!)
• ..and make 56 posts on Facebook as well.

Not bad eh...?

Lets see what 2023 brings ! 

Somewhat Old Cold War Commander

 With the new edition of CWC coming put from Pendraken recently, I remembered I hadn't posted a load of photos I took of a CWC Big Game (OK, 9x4 table with 1/300th scale models) that we played last autumn in Brixham after the Brixham Classic.

So, with a bit of time on my hands, here they all are shufled together into a single page 'lite' battle report (the ones here are just a taster)

 See the full set here

1/300th US Moderns on eBay

The seemingly interminable modern 1/300th recycling/refurbishing project grinds on, this installment being a rather low-tech announcement of the sale of about half of the US armour collection which I've been working through.

They are on eBay now via this link

The set is suitable for Team Yankee (assuming you're playing in a proper scale for moderns!), Cold War Commander, Oil Wars, Modern Spearhead or other similar division/company/batallion level Modern or ultra-modern rules.

The models are all (I believe) Heroics & Ros, and are painted in a rather fetching Gulf War era MERDC 4-colour cammo scheme.

The set includes:

• 16 M1's
• 17 M60A3's 
• 2 M901 ITV TOW
• 27 LAV with 25mm turret
• 10 LAV with 90mm turret
• 1 LAV ITV TOW 
• 1 LAV Command
• 10 LTVP/AAV 
• 6 M2 Bradley 
• 6 Jeeps with TOW 
• 4 Hummers
• 1 M577 command
• 2 Chapparall AA missile
• 1 DIVADS M113-mounted 25mm AA 
• 1 Apache helos
• 2 Cobra helos  

Both helos come with plastic rotor disks - the disks are fairly old and have gone rather grimy and opaque but hey, they are still rotor disks and they're a little hard to find these days.

This lot would set you back around £80 in unpainted lead from Heroics and Ros if you wanted to buy them today (tanks are 75p, other vehicles are 65p each and helos are £3-£3.50 each according to their website), but these guys are good to go right now straight out of the packet - or with a quick wash with something from Army Painter and perhaps a drag over with a drybrush they'll really "pop" even more!

The models are packed and ready to be despatched promptly on receipt of payment. Postage is charged at Royal Mail small parcels cost, no markup for 'packaging' or the like.

10% of the sale fee goes to SSAFA the Forces charity as well.

Heres the link again to the listing 

Building Renovation Project

As part of the "desert modern" restoration project I've slowly been working through recently I came into possession of a large number of 1/300th scale buildings as well as the aforementioned hundreds of tanks and vehicles - in fact, far too many to use sensibly.

A number of these buildings have now been donated to the CLWC storage cupboard for club use, and the remainder I decided to mount onto hardboard to create a series of easily portable and deplyable towns and hamlets for CWC, copying the European buildings I already own (which are much nicer as they were pro-painted and made by Timecast).

In gluing the buildings to each small baseboard I managed (just about) to leave enough space on most of the edges to fit in a handful of my AFV's - all of which are based on 20mm wide and 30-40mm deep bases.

This allows a number of tanks to be placed in each town able to shoot out, but also makes it impossible to deploy a line of tanks in the cover of the BUA in that terrible 'wheel to wheel' style seen far too often on armour-based games.

Or, put another way, anyone using these towns is now forced to be sensible in how they put their AFVs on table !

 The ground is my usual builders sand, stained with woodstain and then drybrushed - given I also did the AFV bases this way they are of course a near-perfect match.

 My final sort-of clever idea here was to cut the bases for the town / village elements out of a single sheet of A4 hardboard, which means that they all now fit perfectly in an A4 Really Useful storage box when they are not in use... as this picture shows.

More tiny tanks...

With too many photos to post in one go, here are the rest of the 1/300th scale moderns - none of which still thankfully smell of Dettol either!

This lot is mostly Arab armies - a mix of T72, T64 and T55s 

The tanks are mostly on 40x20 bases, with other AFVs on 30x20 and 20x20 for the small ones 

I'm not sure if this Desert MERDC scheme was actually used, but it does look cool! 

I seem to have a full set of M60s, AAV7's, M1's, Bradleys and other toys - probably far too many to actually use in CWC!

The M60's have had the most work done in terms of removing the old paint and metal rot

There were also some random French and other vehicles, apparently from a French Recce force that there is no real list for in CWC at the moment as it may be a bit too modern,

The T55's are I think rather ropey Skytrex models. For all of the tanks they are Army Painter desert sand spray, with Army Painter diluted soft tone wash on the upper surfaces and Dark Tone on the wheels and tracks.  

My attempts to paint the tracks themselves are a partial; success (aka a bit rubbish) but at tabletop distances they are OK (honestly...)

I suspect everyone in the world owns 30+ of these H&R models...

T64 eport version - again I think Skytrex

A full collection of AFVs, as well as PT76's round out the collection

Refurbished 1/300th scale tanks

A couple of months ago I was gifted a huge collection of 1/300th scale tanks by brother, most of which I'd actually painted and some of which I'd owned way back when we were both still at school.

Other than the sheer amazement as to just how dammned many of the blighters there actually were (and being mind-boggled that we managed to even play a single turn either of the old WRG modern rules, or the even more complex and marker-tastic Battlegroup moderns with quite so many AFVs on table..), it was also a challenge to see how easily it would be to upgrade some of them to a full set of CWC Middle Eastern forces.

None of them were based, and more concerningly a significant proportion of them were suffering from some sort of evil metal rot/fungal plague as well.  The internet provided some help, and I ended up buying a large amount of Dettol to act as a paint stripper - and smelling out the house in the process with a rather different, more medicinal small than I usually do (with paint...)!

The end result is four full A4 trays worth of based 1/300th AFVs, and at least as much again that will go for sale to clubmates or on eBay in the new year.

Here are pictures of the Israelis, and also some of the Brits as well:

Israelis and some extras for other forces in the storage tray. This is an A4 plastic paper storage box from Paperchase lined with steel paper for the magnabased AFVs top stick to. 

A layer of bubble wrap will sit on top of them and hold them all in place when the lid is shut, allowing them to be stored upright alongside the rules in a bookcase. 

British command stand

Israeli command stands

British Challenger AFV's, command and Warrior IFV's. 

The basing is magnabased card, with sand glued onto it, stained with Rustins woodstain and then drybrished in pale grey and the old standard of Bleached Bone 

The metal rot!  I guess I could have just left them as-is and used them for FWC ...

Dettol, an old toothbrish head, and a bad smell ... 

M60's post-soaking

 

British recce units

Skytrex (I think) Centurions

Set of three Israeli tanks

The Russian-supplied kit, and a USMC desert-MERDC battlegroup will be posted soon..